Trump asks Supreme Court to allow him to remove birthright citizenship

On Thursday, the Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court to allow a restriction on birthright citizenship in about half of the country for children born to illegal immigrants and foreign tourists.

Judges in cases filed by 22 states and the District of Columbia have imposed countrywide injunctions against Trump's executive order, which civil rights organizations and Democratic-led governments argue contradicts the nation's history and the Constitution. The order, enacted on Trump's first day back in the White House, denies automatic citizenship to new babies whose parents are neither US citizens nor lawful permanent residents – a group estimated by some surveys to be more than 150,000 newborns every year.

In January, a federal court called his executive order "blatantly unconstitutional" and stopped its execution. Days later, a Maryland court stated that Trump's proposal "runs counter to our nation's 250-year history of citizenship by birth."

For almost 150 years, courts have interpreted the 14th Amendment's wording as granting citizenship to anybody "born or naturalized in the United States," regardless of their parents' immigration status. A historic Supreme Court judgment from 1898 upheld that interpretation of the statute, and the present court has shown little appetite to reexamine that decision.

In its request to the Supreme Court, the administration asked the justices to limit the nationwide orders to the individuals or states involved in the litigation while those cases work their way through the court system, or to at least allow the relevant federal agencies to begin developing plans and issuing public guidance for banning birthright citizenship if Trump's effort is ultimately legal.

If the Trump administration is successful in convincing the Supreme Court to confine the injunctions to states involved in the dispute, it may begin denying automatic citizenship to children born in 28 states and other US territories.

“Every court to consider President Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship by Executive Order has found it is flagrantly unconstitutional, and all three appellate courts to review DOJ’s emergency applications have rejected them,” Platkin said in a statement. “We expect that the Supreme Court will reject it too. The Trump Administration offers no good reason to upend centuries of constitutional law recognizing birthright citizenship through this rushed, emergency petition.”

Most legal experts believe the initiative is hopeless and unlikely to be implemented because the Constitution's 14th Amendment clearly states that anybody born in the United States is a citizen.

The birthright citizenship issues involve the 14th Amendment, which was ratified after the Civil War in 1868 to create citizenship for liberated Black Americans, as well as "all people born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." The citizenship clause overturned the Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which denied citizenship to Black Americans.

In 1898, the Supreme Court established the right to birthright citizenship in the case of Wong Kim Ark, a San Francisco native born to Chinese parents. The court determined that he was a US citizen after being denied admittance following a vacation overseas.

In its petition on Thursday, the Trump administration stated that individual states lack legal basis to pursue citizenship rights on behalf of residents, and that lower-court judgments have made it more difficult for Trump to define national immigration policy.

In the Washington state lawsuit, Judge John Coughenour of the United States District Court in Seattle stated that birthright citizenship "is a fundamental right, a constitutional right," and reprimanded Trump for violating the Constitution for "political or personal gain."

Coughenour, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, stated that if the Trump administration wishes to modify the 14th Amendment, it must propose a constitutional amendment, which would need passage by a huge majority of Congress and the states.

“The fact that the government cloaked what is in effect a constitutional amendment under the guise of an executive order is equally unconstitutional,” Coughenour said during a hearing in which he issued the nationwide injunction. “The Constitution is not something the government can play policy games with.”

An emergency request requires at least five votes from the Supreme Court's nine justices.